Maple Leaf bike-to-work riders equal city average

Our news partner The Seattle Times has an interesting story today on which neighborhoods use bikes to commute to work.

Bottom line: Maple Leaf bike commuters are right at the citywide average. We’re 2.46 percent, the average of ride-to-work residents is 3 percent. (Use the interactive map on the Times story to see more.)

This is interesting for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that it’s actually kinda hard to bike commute from Maple Leaf.

In our previous post, It’s all uphill to here, we pointed out not only that Maple Leaf is the third highest hill in the city, but that Fifth Avenue Northeast, a very common route between Maple Leaf and downtown, is a whopping (that was our word) 11 percent grade at its steepest section.

The Times says the highest percentage of bike commuters are just north of the U District, at 9.46 percent.

What we’d like to know, though, is how they know. The story is by their librarian, the “FYI Guy,” and he says he analyzed 2012 bike commuting estimates from data provider Experian. It’d be good to know what those estimates are based on.